Our podcast series welcomes lots of our friends from the world of opera and the arts, including singers, players, directors, conductors and more, for thought-provoking discussions. We hope you'll join us too.
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Music extracts and discussion on Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, ahead of the new production at Longborough Festival Opera in 2025.
Music extracts and discussion on Wahnfried: the birth of the Wagner cult, a major new opera with the UK premiere at Longborough in 2025. Featuring the opera's composer Avner Dorman, conductor Justin Brown and Polly Graham who will direct the 2025 production.
Musicologist, translator and lecturer John Deathridge discusses musical threads in the Ring cycle, and offers advice on how to navigate the story. With musical extracts featuring Longborough's Alberich, the internationally celebrated baritone Mark Stone.
Musical extracts and discussion about some of the 2025 programme: Dorman's Wahnfried, and Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, with Polly Graham, Justin Brown, Harry Sever and soprano Rachel Nicholls.
Götterdämmerung from the perspective of its heroine, Brünnhilde, with thoughts and musical excerpts from Professor Peter Franklin, conductor and pianist Justin Brown, and Longborough's own Brünnhilde Lee Bisset.
We celebrate the upcoming 2024 season at Longborough - a new production of La bohème, alongside the culmination of our Ring cycle - and with readings and music from some of our brilliant Emerging Artists, look ahead at the exciting plans for our 2025 programme.
Readings and music from our book launch, where author Richard Bratby talks to music historian Sophie Redfern about the story of opera at Longborough.
L'Orfeo music director Robert Howarth and lutenist Lynda Sayce discuss interpreting manuscripts from Monteverdi's era.
Looking ahead to our 2023 production, Robert Howarth, Olivia Fuchs and tenor Tom Randle explore Orfeo's pivotal scenes and monologues as he journeys into the underworld to find Euridice.
Wagner fits within a German ecological tradition stretching from Von Humboldt through Haeckel and Himmler to the Greens. Can any of this be heard in the music itself? This talk by Michael Spitzer, illustrated by pianist Kelvin Lim, shows you how.
Our 2022 festival features an exciting double bill performed by our Emerging Artists. In this episode, Longborough's artistic director Polly Graham speaks to the production's director Jenny Ogilvie about her plans, with musical extracts from pianist Clíodna Shanahan and countertenor Keith Pun.
Korngold's Die tote Stadt forms an exciting part of Longborough's summer 2022 festival. In this episode, Korngold experts Jessica Duchen and Michael Haas teach us more about this remarkable composer. With musical extracts from pianist Charles Matthews.
Longborough Festival Opera's Music Director Anthony Negus joins the pianist and musicologist Professor Kenneth Hamilton, as they discuss the surprising personal and musical relationships between Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Hosted by writer and librettist Sophie Rashbrook.
Longborough Festival Opera's Artistic Director Polly Graham joins the acclaimed librettist and opera director Sir David Pountney, who was in the midst of staging his own Ring cycle in Chicago when the pandemic first struck.
Conductor Justin Brown and director Olivia Fuchs chat to music journalist Richard Bratby about this incredible work: Janáček's musical language; his parallels to Wagner; and why grown adults would want to see an opera about talking animals.
Writer and librettist Sophie Rashbrook chats to the historian Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough and soprano Lee Bisset, who was set to have been Brünnhilde in Wagner's Die Walküre at Longborough in the postponed 2020 season. In their discussion, they explore the roles and mythical origins of Wagner’s women.
Music journalist Richard Bratby chats to Longborough's Music Director Anthony Negus and bass-baritone Paul Carey Jones, who was scheduled to sing Wotan in Wagner's Die Walküre at Longborough in the postponed 2020 season. In their discussion they trace Wotan's journey through Wagner's Ring cycle.
Find out more about Longborough Festival Opera.
Our new book celebrates the story of opera at Longborough: how one couple took an empty field and a dream of an idea and turned it into bricks, mortar and sublime music.
Plan your visit to Longborough, with full details of dining options, running times, useful local information, and advice on what to wear.
